Editors' Review

In 2718, multiple civilizations scour the galaxy colonizing planets. Galactic Civilizations lets gamers compete with various alien races in a quest for survival and domination. The simple interface belies an extremely involved and challenging turn-based strategy game with interesting RPG elements. The graphics and sound won't put much stress on your hardware, but they have a certain retro charm.

The game starts simply, as players develop technologies and colonize the galaxy. Once the colonies have been established, the game becomes a race for resources and a battle for technological, political, military, or cultural supremacy, based on customizable victory conditions. The technology tree is tremendous fun, featuring Mind Terror Weapons, Interspecies Philosophy, and Overlord Technology. The various political parties, alien racial attributes, and galactic events give each game a character and story of its own. The lack of an effective in-game tutorial makes immersing yourself in the game take longer than it should, and the game lacks a true multiplayer version; but Galactic Civilizations is great fun for strategists, especially fans of table-top RPGs such as Star Frontiers.

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Publisher's Description

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From Stardock:
Galactic Civilizations is a space-based strategy game set near the dawn of the 23rd century. As the leader of humankind, you must expand civilization into a hostile galaxy filled with alien empires bent on galactic domination. The game has a heavy emphasis on diplomacy, economics, and culture, as well as military generalship. Galactic Civilizations won Editor's Choice awards from Computer Gaming World and Computer Games magazines.

Galactic Civilizations is an awesome game. It has extremely customizable difficulty, so you can start out easy and play more and more challenging opponants.
The computer AI is supert, and the four different winning conditions allow for superb replayability (shoot for a military victory, or win by research, or influence, or alliances... it's up to you, and each is challenging.
You also get to play as evil, good, or neutral -- and each choice influences how the other civilizations react to you.

Very highly recommended! I've been playing for years, and can still get engrossed.

This was an amazing game back in 1993 when it was on OS/2. Now it's back in Windows and much better than before. I LOVE IT. The demo version limits the lenght of the game and some other things, but I'm sure that after a week of playing the demo, you'll go out and buy it!

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